Alesiellen

Alesi Whittaker

Fashion Business and Promotion student at BCU

BLACK POWER

Gender in Fashion Is Dead. A model rocks a Sharpe Suiting blazer.

Photo by Molly Adams, courtesy Sharpe Suiting Get the VICE App on iOS and Android Leon Wu dressed like the other sorority girls at UCLA, wore a uniform while training to become a Marine, and finally found himself while dressed in drag. Throughout his early life, he presented as female. "I tried really hard in college to fit in with what was expected as an Asian young lady," Wu said.
This Is What Fashion People Think About ISIS and Police Brutality. Fashion people doing their thing in New York.

Photo via Flickr user Susan Sermoneta Fashion Week brings together the beautiful, rich, and talented, along with moochers and lots of Europeans, to play dress-up on a big stage in cities like New York. It's easy to assume this crowd is a bunch of airheads who don't know shit about what's going on in the world. And for some of them—especially the male models—that is absolutely the case.

But in interviewing folks at Fashion Week in NYC over the past few days, we found that most attendees had at least something interesting to say about the summer's big news stories—whether it was the police brutality (and subsequent protests) in Ferguson, Missouri, the killing of asthmatic father Eric Garner on Staten Island by police choke hold, or even the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Photos by Jesse Miller-Gordon Paul, Model, Manhattan. Modeling team tackles national issues in annual fashion show – The Sentinel. XMT models strike a group pose on the runway in their "Joanne the Scammer" themed outfits.

Photo credit: Victoria Johnson The Xtreem Modeling Team hosted its third annual fashion show, “Xtreem Season 3,” on Friday, Nov. 11, on the Marietta campus. “This is our third one since starting this organization, and this is the biggest turnout we have ever had,” said Olivia Saulsby, senior accounting major and XMT president. The audience members were very interactive throughout the show and scene changes.
What It's Like to Sell Drugs at Fashion Week. Photo via Flickr user Imagens Evangelicas From the widespread rumors about Kate Moss's cocaine use to clothing lines with ad campaigns that feature a model blatantly sniffing poppers, it's no secret that drug use and fashion go hand-in-hand.

While not all models and scene-y industry types are cocaine fiends (there's Adderall too, duh), things get turned up a notch during New York Fashion Week, when countless Europeans in panther fur jackets, greased-up hair, and disposable incomes descend on the city to stand next to their equally-terrible New York counterparts at runway presentations and after-parties. A couple years ago, VICE spoke to a drug dealer about how biz skyrockets during Miami Art Basel, so we decided it'd be a good idea to talk to another dope peddler about putting in work at NYFW. After our regular connects blacklisted us the moment we said "question for an article," we remembered that our one friend who works in the fashion industry as a modeling agent used to push weight.
Log In. The show, called “On the Inside” and on view through Dec. 18, has been more than four years in the making and is a collaboration between Ms. von Furstenberg and Black and Pink, a grass-roots organization that provides a network of support for L.G.B.T. inmates and works to abolish the prison system.

Photo “I’m not a volunteering type of person,” said Ms. von Furstenberg, who began studying media and comparative literature at Brown University at 16, and whose past projects include opening Steinberg and Sons, a clothing boutique in Los Angeles that’s now closed; recording music as the lead singer in a band called Playdate; and, more recently, writing, directing and producing two films, one a short (“Tyrolean Riviera”) and one a feature (“Tanner Hall”). So how did a nonvolunteering type end up doing something that so closely resembles volunteering? Ms. von Furstenberg has a genetic muscular disease that makes her tire quickly and sometimes requires her to use a wheelchair.
Tim Gunn Says Fashion Has a Plus-Size Problem. Tim Gunn has a challenge for American fashion designers: Stop marginalizing women size 14 and higher, and start dressing them to look just as great as their size 4 counterparts.

And, while you’re at it, stop calling them “plus-size.” In a video that aired on the PBS NewsHour, the Project Runway guru gives one of the best-articulated arguments to date for more and better garments for women who wear double digits. Instead of simply bemoaning the lack of options for larger women, he expertly explains how designers can — and why they should — start expanding their repertoire to include women of all sizes. Plus is the majority “Would it surprise you to know that the average American woman now wears between a size 16 and a size 18?” Despite the fact that plus-size women (sorry, Tim) make up the majority in the U.S., they are treated by the fashion industry as an insignificant minority.

Gisele Bundchen in burka backlash as model 'wears disguise to visit plastic surgeon'
Gisele Bundchen received backlash on Twitter today after the New York Post carried a picture of the supermodel wearing a burka to visit a plastic surgeon.

The traditional Muslim wear covered everything but the woman's feet, but the newspaper claimed it was the 35-year-old model in disguise so she slip into the surgery clinic without being noticed by paparazzi. Under the headline 'Cover Up!
' the newspaper alleged Gisele was visiting the International Clinique du Parc Monceau in Paris for $11,000 surgeries on her breasts and eyes.

The pictures reportedly showed Gisele heading into the swanky clinic on July 15 - during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Figurative Painting: An Unfashionable Art Trend Makes a Comeback. Figurative painting, it seems, is destined to be contemporary art’s perennial sidepiece: always available for a fling, never for very long.

The last time one could admit to a passion for it without committing social suicide in the art world was probably around 2003, when the painter John Currin had his midcareer survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. Currin, known for injecting new ideas into age-old images of the body, was handsome, successful, and youthful.